Despite rapid gains on technology, humans are ultimately responsible for ensuring the success and safety of the aviation industry globally.

However, they must continue to be knowledgeable, flexible, dedicated, and efficient while exercising good judgment to enable improve safety in air travel.

Consequently, the industry has continued to make major investments in training, equipment, and systems that have long-term implications. And because technology has continued to evolve faster than the ability to predict how humans will interact with it, the industry can no longer depend as much on experience and intuition to guide decisions related to human performance.

Human error has been documented as a primary contributor to more than 70 per cent of commercial airplane hull-loss accidents. While typically associated with flight operations, human error has also recently become a major concern in maintenance practices and air traffic management.

It has grown increasingly popular as the commercial aviation industry has realised that human error, rather than mechanical failure, underlies most aviation accidents and incidents. If interpreted narrowly, human factors are often considered synonymous with crew resource management (CRM) or maintenance resource management (MRM)

However, it is much broader in both its knowledge base and scope. Human factors involves gathering information about human abilities, limitations, and other characteristics and applying it to tools, machines, systems, tasks, jobs, and environments to produce safe, comfortable, and effective human use

Boeing has also continued to examine human performance throughout the airplane to improve usability, maintainability, reliability, and comfort. In addition, human factors specialists participate in analysing operational safety and developing methods and tools to help operators better manage human error

Despite impressive improvement in technology, human beings still play a central role in ensuring safety as they serve as an interface between other components of flight operations including machines and environment